


How One Thing Leads to Another, A Story of Coincidence

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-04
Updated: 2011-09-04
Packaged: 2017-10-31 01:48:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At 42, Eduardo Saverin has three things to his name: a plane ticket, one half of a formerly conjugal bank account, and a list.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How One Thing Leads to Another, A Story of Coincidence

**Author's Note:**

> Done for [this prompt](http://mark-eduardo.livejournal.com/368440.html?thread=2216504#t2216504) at the mark_eduardo prompt fest. Or, instead of making up right after the deposition, it takes Mark and Eduardo ten to fifteen years to reconcile.
> 
> You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/104309.html).

-

 

 

**i.**

 

There's a checklist.

It's not written down, or prioritized, or even consciously acknowledged, like so much of Eduardo's daily routine is, but it exists. It makes itself known whenever he needs to add something to it, or when something is satisfyingly crossed off.

At any given time, it probably looks a little something like this:

_~~1\. become more successful than parents~~  
2\. go skydiving. everyone should try skydiving at least once.  
3\. go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras_ (this was actually one of Dustin's lingering desires, and its place on the list mostly just serves as a memorial, as Eduardo would probably feel incredibly skeevy going _now)_  
 _ ~~4\. surprise Moira with a trip to Paris~~  
 ~~5\. kiss her at the top of the Eiffel Tower, because she is your wife and it doesn't matter where you are, you want her to know she's the only thing you truly NEED~~  
6\. have a burger at In-and-Out  
7\. be a better father than yours was_

Etc, etc, and so forth.

Basically, it is Eduardo's bucket list.

Everyone's got one of those, right?

 

**ii.**

 

At midnight, in a city Eduardo's never been to before and won't be here long enough to properly appreciate (which depresses him, even after all this time -- what's the point of coming all this way, to somebody else's soil, if he doesn't get to _see_ it? It's like saying, _oh, sure, I've been there, beautiful place,_ when all you've ever done is gone from one end of the airport to the other) he checks off an item from his bucket list that is either #15 or #16, depending on if he's willing to admit that one about blacklisting First National Bank is really there.

There's an employee standing across the aisle, and she keeps eyeballing him as she sticker-tapes price labels onto plastic-wrapped classic board games, slowly lining them up on their shelves. She doesn't come over, only settles for the occasional disapproving look, and Eduardo's fairly certain that the people who work at Wal*Mart have to be blessed with the patience of a Catholic saint (it's the Catholics who have saints, right? He could never keep those straight.)

But, as these things go, there are only three good places to have a cathartic breakdown: in your own home; in your therapist's tastefully-decorated office, where you're at least promised a steady supply of tissues should you start crying; and in the middle of a Wal*Mart at a strange hour of the night, trying on every single hat on the rack because why not, you're a human being and you've worked your ass off to get this far in life and so if all you want to do is try on all those hats and see what you look like, well, you go, honey.

He's got a green-and-white scarf wrapped around his neck and is just pulling a wide-brim gardening hat on his head, complete with complimentary green ribbon, when he notices a girl standing at the end of the aisle, watching him curiously.

Eduardo turns to her, putting a hand on his hip and asking her, "Well? What do you think?"

There's probably some universal rule that men over a certain age should _never_ approach little girls to whom they are not related, but this one just mirrors his hand-on-hip stance and appraises him with the openness of someone who's been protected from those kinds of stories.

She's just a kid, old enough to be in school and young enough that she probably doesn't hate it yet, with shoes that light up when she stomps her way over to him and a flashy belt so tiny that it probably wouldn't even go around one of Eduardo's thighs. There's no one else nearby, which makes Eduardo's pulse spike with worry.

"It's not a good look on you," she says decisively, and holds out her hand for the hat.

So they work their way back down the rack, Eduardo modeling each one of the hats for her while she taps her chin and looks thoughtful and tells him to tilt his head this way or that, plainly lost in the pretend fashion-designer role she's made for herself. She winds up with a scarf of her own, pink with sequined edges, carelessly tossed over one shoulder and almost dangling to the floor. She favors the bigger, showy bowler caps and pirate hats -- personally, Eduardo's kind of fond of them too. They make him feel adventurous, like the kind of guy who goes out and completes all the things on his bucket list, even the little things, like:

_15/16. do something weird in a Wal*Mart and stop caring what people think of you for awhile._

"Excellent choice," he tells her, sweeping the latest one from his head (it's even got a pheasant feather -- perfect for sweeping) and taking a bow.

"I know," she says sagely, as if this is her due.

She's black, her hair pulled back into two low ponytails and her part zig-zagging crookedly in a way that might be intentional, but probably isn't; it looks too similar to the few, futile times he tried to part Lydia's hair in a straight line when she was little. When she studies him, he sees that her eyes are more on the blue side than brown, which, combined with the shape of her face, tells him that (like him) she's probably mixed-race.

At some point, just as Eduardo's stomach is starting to knot at the idea that _nobody_ knows where their child has gotten off to and it's _midnight,_ this is not a good combination of circumstances at all, a loud, jingling ring comes from one of her pockets. She fishes out a phone more complicated than Eduardo's earliest desktop set-up and taps at the screen, putting it to her ear with an impatient "hello?"

She meets Eduardo's gaze and rolls her eyes at whatever's being demanded of her from the other end. "You told me to go play!"

"I didn't mean _all the way across the store!"_ Eduardo hears loud and clear, even standing all the way over here. 

He smiles, setting the last hat -- a pinstripe newsie -- back on the rack.

"Well, be more specific next time!" the girl says with an expressive huff. And, " _Fine._ Geez."

She pulls her phone away from her ear, tapping at it again and giving Eduardo a sorely put-upon look. "Thanks for not letting me get kidnapped by anyone, mister," she tells him, making Eduardo blink -- had he really been hovering that protectively? "Bye!"

She ducks sideways, out into the aisle, and Eduardo leans out over the top of the display to remind her that she's still wearing the pink scarf and she should probably give it back, and finds himself face-to-face with Mark Zuckerberg, who is rounding the corner that very second.

The words die in his throat. 

Mark (it's always _Mark_ in his head, though out loud he says _Zuckerberg_ right along with the rest of the world, and just _Zuck_ after the third gin-and-tonic) is greyer and less Photoshopped-looking than the last magazine article Eduardo saw him in; curls not quite coiling up thick enough to hide the way he's balding on top, his goatee more salt-and-pepper up close, and the utter thunderstruck expression on his face is not his most attractive look. He has a bag from the in-store Taco Bell in one hand, and a plastic camera slung on a strap over his shoulder, one of the toy ones that makes convincing noises but doesn't actually take pictures, as pink and glitter-studded as the girl who fits in at his side, tucking her hand into his with the heavy, long-suffering look of someone with a newly-applied ankle monitor.

"Hi," goes Eduardo, kneejerk. He steps out from behind the rack of hats. "Hey, hello," he adds, for no real reason. And then -- because while Eduardo's list of contacts is long enough that he has, in fact, unexpectedly run into acquaintances in airports on foreign soil before, it's never happened in the middle of _store_ on foreign soil before, the world is not that small -- "What are you doing here?"

Mark holds up the bag of Taco Bell. "Chalupas," he goes, flat. "This is the closest Taco Bell for miles."

"And I wanted churros!" the girl adds, and stretches up, making grabby hands for the food. The movement sends the sequins of her scarf cascading off one shoulder, and she catches it and goes, "oh!"

Scarf outstretched, she comes back to Eduardo, who ducks down to her level out of instinct and lets her wrap the scarf around his neck, where the satiny fabric settles against the knit green-and-white one he's already wearing, the price tags dangling off to one side.

"What about you?" goes Mark stiltedly, when she returns to him.

He reaches out with one hand, catching her head against his palm and tugging her in, instinctive, the way parents do when they need to reassure themselves after their children have disappeared on them. Eduardo can see the resemblance now; it's in their thin eyes, their cheekbones, the way they pull their shoulders back.

He blinks some, still crouched down, and then holds up the scarves.

"Bucket list," he answers.

This startles Mark into smiling, seemingly without any permission from his brain -- a spastic twitch at the corners of his mouth. "You ..." he says slowly, the smile making his voice come out warmer. "You came to Wal*Mart to try on scarves because it was on your bucket list?"

Eduardo opens his mouth to add, _and to not care what people think while doing it,_ because that was more the bucket list part. It's harder than he thought; Eduardo never wanted to live in a world where nobody cared what anybody else was thinking. He's not that kind of person. It sounds like a very lonely existence, to not care. (And besides, the first thing he'd done was turn around and ask Mark Zuckerberg's daughter for her opinion, so he's not sure if he can cross #15/16 off yet.)

But before he can say anything, the girl interrupts, easily, like she's sure of the attention, "And hats! We were trying on hats, too."

This distracts Mark, who looks down at her, a reproving furrow to his eyebrows. "Why were you trying on hats with strangers?"

"Because stasistically --" and neither of them correct her pronunciation of the word. "-- I am more likely to be kidnapped and sold to the circus by someone I know, so it's safer for me to talk to strangers."

"What even --" Mark tugs on one of her ponytails. "Your logic is a little flawed there," he tells her, his tone as dry as bone.

" _Dad,"_ she goes, shaking him off and speaking slowly, like she's trying to be reasonable. "I'm almost ten. That means I'll have two digits in my age, just like you and Mom and everybody else, so maybe you should start treating me like everybody else."

"I don't think so." He sounds amused.

She turns her head and widens her eyes at Eduardo, all, _can you believe this guy?_

He grins back at her, double-wrapped in scarves and trying his hardest not to look like someone who kidnaps girls in nifty light-up shoes and sells them to the circus. 

"You're in luck," he tells her. "I'm not someone you know, but nor am I a stranger. I'm Eduardo, and I went to school with your dad."

In his peripheral, he catches a glimpse of Mark's responding smile, quick and fleeting, because that's the identifier Eduardo uses to describe the two of them, Eduardo-and-Mark, even now; not _we started a company together,_ not _I sued him for control of everything but we settled out of court and then I was politely told to disappear,_ but rather, _we went to school together,_ like that's the most important way of looking at it, the most important thing to remember.

She nods, accepting this in stride, and then she asks solemnly, "Did he snore then, too?"

"Alicia!" says Mark, startled, and the name pings familiarly in the back of Eduardo's mind. He knew that already, read it somewhere and tucked it into his brain for safe-keeping, but didn't remember until right this second. Alicia Zuckerberg, born at the height of the wartime economic boom; around the time that Eduardo and Moira had moved into their last house, the ranch-style with the swingset in the back that Lydia had been so excited about.

"No," he tells her, a grin spreading. "No, the snoring must be a recent development."

"Oh my god," he hears faintly from somewhere above their heads.

"My name's Alicia," she tells him approvingly. "But I call myself Desarae for short."

Eduardo blinks, not quite sure how you get _Desarae_ out of _Alicia,_ but a quick glance up at Mark's face tells him this is a frequent occurrence, like maybe she tries on fashionable names the same way she had Eduardo change hats.

"Pleased to meet you," he tells her gamely. "You have excellent fashion sense. I don't know how I would have gotten on without you."

"I like pretty things," she volunteers, shrugging her shoulders. Her idea of pretty seems to primarily include anything that's pink and covered in a sparkly veneer, but that's okay; he's pretty sure the second part of that statement includes, _and I like telling people what to do._

"Do you want a ride?" Mark offers, cutting right over them.

Eduardo looks up at him, startled, half-expecting Mark to be talking to someone else entirely, because that's an absurd thing to hear out of anybody you meet in a Wal*Mart, regardless of how you previously knew them. But no, Mark's looking right at him. He's wearing a pair of cargo pants, the kind with enough pockets that he's probably carrying Waldo, Carmen Sandiego, _and_ the Lindberg baby without anyone being the wiser, but they're an old pair; the hems are frayed where he's walked on them, and his wallet has worn a square, white outline of itself onto his back pocket after many years of being tucked into the same spot.

"Umm," Eduardo goes, because he got here via cab, and isn't sure he remembers how to get back to his hotel, or even where, exactly, his hotel is. 

Alicia-Desarae looks equally nonplussed, blinking upwards, owlish.

"We'll need to stop at home first, of course," Mark continues, and catches the back of his daughter's shirt, reining her in again. "It'll probably be out of the way, but somebody here is already out way past her curfew."

She really has that eye-roll down pat, Eduardo will give her that.

"Does he do that a lot?" he asks her in an exaggerated undertone.

It's her turn to look at him with that undisguised impatience. Like she has to say it more often than she likes, she rattles off, "I get my full servings of fruits and vegetables, I get plenty of sleep every night, I am never left home alone, and I do not play video games that aren't appropriate for my age group. This is a treat. Us being here is a _treat._ Don't you have treats?"

Eduardo holds up his hands in acquiescence, glancing up at Mark, who looks completely unruffled by the fact he has his offspring trained to offer evidence on command that she is being raised properly, all of which Eduardo already knows: it's in Alicia's attitude and the way she holds herself like she's sure of the support behind her. He'd always known that while Mark is absolute crap at taking care of himself, he _never_ neglects the things that are most important to him.

"A ride would be great," he manages.

Mark's lips twitch at the corners, the closest to a smile he's willing to give. When he sidles past, close enough that Eduardo catches the smell of aftershave and fast food, he plucks up one of the hats -- a dark brown bowler, with a little Irish flag cheerily pinned to the brim -- and drops it onto Eduardo's head.

"If you've come all this way to do the bucket list thing, you should at least get some kind of touristy memorabilia to remember it by," he goes, and bares his teeth.

 

**iii.**

 

This is what Eduardo knows about Mark Zuckerberg.

Founder and CEO of Facebook, he's one of the richest, most privileged men in the world, with all the arrogance to match, and a long, long time ago, he had a best friend named Eduardo Saverin.

There isn't a lot of evidence of this, no easy paper trail that proves one boy met another boy and became friends, because they didn't share the same dorm, didn't have any of the same classes, didn't join the same clubs (with the exception of AEPi, but Eduardo doubts the reliability of their records; he's pretty sure they spelled his name _Edwardo_ on everything) and before he came to California and signed the kind of business contracts that no twenty-year-old even _dreams_ of signing, the only way his name and Mark Zuckerberg's were linked was in a very strange, scathing article in the school newspaper involving a chicken.

But they were friends, up until Facebook happened and Eduardo Saverin was left alone in his apartment in New York, breathing slowly, the ash of one relationship in the trash can and phone to his ear, unable to do anything but listen as Sean Parker of all fucking people did exactly what Eduardo could not; he got them the money.

Eduardo can't define a certain moment where their friendship began, but he knows where it ended; over the phone, with the entire length of a country between them.

There'd been some stuff after that, of course; a semester-long lie of _I need my CFO,_ a stab in the back, depositions and a quiet settlement and a lifelong distrust of written contracts, but that was the moment Eduardo figured out that their friendship had fractured beyond repair. 

It wasn't until many years later, standing behind Moira with a bowl of soup in his hand, looking over her shoulder at the profile of her client and wondering out loud, "why do they keep this guy in such a powerful position? He's contributed absolutely nothing of substance and at this point, it looks like he's more harm than help," that he finally found himself on the outside of what happened, and thought, _oh,_ as the last of the rage fell away. It's not a matter of apologizing and forgiving, not really -- that's what you do when you bump into someone at the airport and knock their coffee out of their hands -- but rather of just _doing_ other things, until you turn around and the memory doesn't loom at you like it's going to consume you. Until you and the memory are okay with each other.

Sometimes Eduardo feels weird to be part of the generation that _remembers_ a time before Facebook, when most everybody he works with these days takes it for granted, like it's always been around. 

Mark went on to make himself a walking Guinness World Record, becoming richer even faster than he would have if he'd tripped over a Persian Gulf's worth of oil. 

Weirdly enough, it's his money that makes him such an endless source of fascination to other people, Eduardo included. The average person works _hard_ to earn enough to keep themselves on the right side of comfortable, and even in the business world, where it is very strongly _go big or go home,_ they put their heads down and they mutter quietly if you've got yourself a billion-dollar evaluation before you've got grey in your hair -- even Eduardo, who arguably cheated to get his share of fortune with that lawsuit (nobody believes he filed it for any other reason than the money, and it's not worth the effort anymore to keep correcting the assumption,) was thirty-five before he hit the billionaire mark.

Go cry some more, right?

But when you're Mark Zuckerberg, and you become that rich, that young, while most people your age are still trying to contemplate a job that doesn't involve the words _do you want fries with that?,_ then what else is there? What is there left to do? 

You are rich, you are famous, you are successful; what next?

Apparently, if you're Mark, your lasting legacy is this:

You spend money like water, like it's as breathable as air and you never have to worry about running out. When you're not working to the bone for your company and playing pretend at business like you have the faintest idea what you're doing, you focus your attention on _everything_ that nobody else has the time for, because if you with all your money cannot bring yourself to care, then who will? 

Around the time you are able to consume alcohol -- legally -- you steal Sean Parker's girlfriend right out from under him, a Victoria's Secret model named Cara (can you hear the echo of Eduardo's vindictive pleasure at that, even through the years?) You date her like you mean it, like you're serious, like you're not a billionaire with a model girlfriend and one of you is always the other's accessory. When, a surprising amount of time later, she breaks up with you in a fairly dramatic fashion (Eduardo remembers reading about it in the back of the company car, fingering glossy magazine pages and feeling like maybe he should make the driver stop for popcorn or something,) then you turn around and you marry the woman you love instead. 

Mazel tov.

She's a US soldier, with cornrows twisted artfully on top of her head and a serpent earring anchored by a gauge through her earlobe and creeping up the cartilage, and your wedding is lavish, held in Nigeria with all her extended family -- you look incredibly awkward in all your wedding photos, and she's taller than you when she wears heels. The two of you have a daughter, who is demanding because she is spoiled and confident because she is loved, and she adores the color pink and telling other people what to do, and the two of you go to Wal*Mart to get a midnight snack at Taco Bell because you can.

You are Mark Zuckerberg, and your life is printed out in magazines and books and on the Internet for anyone to pick up at any point, and when you retire, many many years from now -- you will probably aim for another world record for how long one person can conceivably be CEO of a company, because that's the kind of thing you do -- then Facebook will go to your chairman, a willowy, hard-eyed woman named Ashleigh, who, like you, was put on academic probation in college and dropped out before her sentence was complete (Sean's fault, of course -- always with the underage sorority girls.) She's one of the few interns who started with Facebook that you haven't managed to drive off; she's outlasted Chris Hughes and Andrew McCallum and even Dustin Moskovitz. She runs the Palo Alto office now, and she will be CEO when you are finished.

Eduardo met her, twice. (Technically, three times: she held the front door open for him when he stalked out of the Facebook offices, security on his heels, but he hadn't really been paying attention then.) The last time, she knocked back a flute of champagne, wiped at the line of her mouth with a knuckle, and told him that Mark was probably training his spawn to be CEO instead.

"I'd be angrier about it, but he's been using her as a shield at press conferences since she was six and 'none of your business' was her favorite thing to say," her smile crept across her mouth, genuine.

And Eduardo, who knows what it's like when fathers _seriously_ train their children to be their successors, brought her another flute of champagne. "To children in the workplace, big and small," he offered, making Ashleigh smirk, and they touched glasses.

He's been patiently living Mark's life through other people and the interviews he finds in the back pages of newspapers for so long that it's jarring, following him and Alicia-Desarae-whatever out of the store.

They cross the semi-empty parking lot, Mark still carrying his daughter's plastic camera by the strap and her dogging his heels, munching happily on her churros (Eduardo's fairly sure they aren't supposed to _crunch_ like that.) 

"Oh," she goes abruptly, like she's just remembering. "Thank you, Dad."

Mark glances over his shoulder, mouth pulled to one side in amusement. Eduardo trails behind them, his brand-new cheap felt bowler cap perched at a jaunty angle on top of his head. "She says when she's almost reached the bottom of the bag," Mark comments, dry.

_Crunch,_ replies Alicia-Desarae, making a face at him. Cinnamon and sugar coat the ends of her fingers.

Where a lifestyle of expensive alcohol and good dinners has broadened Eduardo's waist and given him a thickness to carry around the belly ("have you thought about suspenders, sweetheart?" Moira had asked him innocently, outside court, and Eduardo made upset noises at her, even though there are so many worse things she could have said. He's only 42, he's not ready to graduate from using belts -- which he doesn't really need, either, to be honest, but he feels like if he wears them still, it'll somehow give the impression that his pants will slide off his hips any moment,) Mark seems to have gone in the opposite direction.

He's lost all the babyish padding Eduardo remembers from the college freshman, along with most of his muscle mass, leaving a skinny someone who might appear diminished if you hadn't seen him snort down interviewers like they weren't worth his time. If he was taller, Eduardo would call him a scarecrow, but as is, he looks at this middle-aged man, and it's easy to see the ghost of Harvard Mark and the premonition of the spindly, broomstick senior he will be, another thirty years down the line.

Alicia-Desarae gets shotgun as soon as they reach the car, climbing into the left-side passenger seat like it doesn't occur to her that she could possibly sit anywhere else, leaving Eduardo to shuffle into the backseat like he's going to jail.

From the front, Mark passes a chalupa back to him from the Taco Bell bag, saying, "I don't even know if you like these."

"I feel like I'm insulting the entire country of Mexico and their idea of cuisine by even thinking about eating this," Eduardo remarks, weighing the chalupa in his palm the way people do with newborn babies when they have no idea how to hold them. 

"Why?" goes Alicia-Desarae curiously, simultaneous with Mark's, "well, see if I ever offer you my hard-earned food again."

Ignoring Mark, Eduardo answers the little girl, "This bears absolutely no resemblance to a real chalupa, or anything Mexican, really."

"But I don't eat it because it's Mexican," she retorts, twisting around in her seat to face him and earning a snappy, _hey, seatbelt! I will be very upset if you go through the windshield_ from Mark. "I eat it because it's _tasty."_

Eduardo can't really argue with that one, and with a quiet mental apology to everybody south of the Rio Grande, he sinks back to eat, not realizing until the smell of cheese and sour cream hits his nose that he hasn't really eaten since the plane. Never mind that he has eaten chalupas that were arguably more authentic, growing up on the fringes of Miami's largest immigrant neighborhood -- at this moment in time, it's the best damn thing he's ever eaten. 

He crunches away at the shell as they drive. It's rained recently, and the car goes hissing across slick roads, its windows fogging along the edges and the night-time colors pulled a shade darker with damp. Up front, Mark and Alicia-Desarae bicker quietly about somebody Eduardo doesn't know.

They pass his hotel, actually; he recognizes the front facade with a surprised jolt, all decadent old marble, the name unfolding across it in curling cursive script.

He doesn't say anything, obstinately because his mouth is full of food at the opportune moment to tell Mark he needs to take a left, but also because he's curious. You don't meet former friends in foreign cities every day.

As if reading his mind, Mark's eyes catch his in the rearview mirror. "Why are you in Dublin?" he asks.

Eduardo swallows his last mouthful of food and answers, "Business." He doesn't know what to do with the wrapper, so he just crumples it into his fist and holds onto it, and then corrects himself with the more honest answer, "Divorce." 

Both are true; this trip has been in his calendar for awhile, and tomorrow (later today) he's going to have to talk to a bunch of local suits about economic forecasting and smile through his jetlag and sleep deprivation. But it hadn't felt necessary until two days ago, standing next to Moira in divorce court, the both of them carrying separate, thick manilla envelopes. They'd even been smiling at each other, Eduardo remembers, because by that point relief at breaking their long stalemate had made them more amicable than anything else. She was going to keep his last name, she told him, because Moira's the kind of person who doesn't quail from the decisions she made, up to and especially her marriage. (Although he's fairly certain the fact she didn't want to go back to her maiden name of Seaman probably had something to do with it.)

This lasted until the filing clerk responsible for getting them out of there hit a long sequence of keys and then smiled up at them, saying, "There! All done! It's a good thing the two of you didn't have any children, or this all could have taken a lot longer."

Moira twisted away, as jerkily as if she had been slapped. It remains, to this day, one of the worst things anyone had ever said to Eduardo, including _it was probably a diversity thing,_ and _he's paying a hundred thousand more than you asked for, Mr. Saverin, provided you sign a nondisclosure agreement,_ and _do you know Lydia's favorite kind of waffle, Ed? I was thinking about it this morning and I just couldn't remember._

"Technically," he says, voice directed at the passing landscape. "The house is hers, so I needed to move anyway, but we're both execs working with the same kinds of venture capitals, so the likelihood that I'll run into her no matter where I go makes it feel like she's kept the entire country."

Mark snorts, and Alicia-Desarae cranes her neck around to look at him again. "What's her name?" she asks curiously. "Your wife?"

"It's Moira."

She brightens. "That's my mom's --"

Noticing the immediate discomfort that blanches across Mark's face, Eduardo talks over her. "What about you guys? Why are you Dublin?"

She huffs, and Mark answers, "Because it's more convenient to live and work where our headquarters are than try to run it from our private island in the Philippines," so dryly that Eduardo can't tell if he's joking or not. Almost without pause, he continues, this time to Alicia-Desarae, "and don't think I didn't see that. Here," he pushes himself up in his seat a little bit to dig in one of his many pockets, producing a Kleenex seemingly by summoning it and handing it over. "Blow your nose, and stop wiping it on your sleeve. This is why we invented modern civilization."

Eduardo, who distinctly remembers Mark _always_ wiping his running nose on the cuffs of his sweatshirts, stifles a laugh into the back of his fist.

"I think it's because you have a complex," Alicia-Desarae says to him confidently. "You think that because you're rich and can do it, you should move to the opposite side of the globe from where your responsibilities are. It's the most rebellious you'll allow yourself to be, since you can't actually, like, disappear. At least," she adds as they roll to a stop at a streetlight and Mark takes the opportunity to turn his head slowly and stare at her. The confidence wavers a little bit. "That's what Mr. Moskovitz says."

Eduardo can't help it this time -- he barks laughter.

Sounding mildly amused, Mark says, "You can call him Dustin, honey."

"I know!" she goes, with full knowledge of how precocious she sounds. "But he likes Mr. Moskovitz better. Says he likes pretending at least one person respects him."

Mark's eyes snap to Eduardo's again in the rearview, and they share identical grins.

"Yeah, _that_ would be a first," Mark goes sarcastically.

Floating at the bottom of Eduardo's list, hazy and nebulous with all the desires he's willing to forget for long periods of time, one comes floating back to the surface, clearly etched in his mind's eye.

_24\. Make Mark smile again. You know which one._

 

**iv.**

 

When Mark said they would have to go a little out of the way, he really wasn't kidding. 

Forty-five minutes into the drive, the city growing thinner and more sparse outside the window, Eduardo starts to understand why Alicia-Desarae considered it such a treat to go all the way to Wal*Mart for Taco Bell.

She falls asleep against the door, her knees tucked up onto the seat. Her shoes light up flickeringly every time they hit a hard bump, but she doesn't stir. There's something with a lot of bass playing on the radio, familiar -- Mark's taste in music hasn't really changed since he gave Microsoft the middle finger over his mp3 player back in high school. Eduardo keeps closing his eyes to it, jolting awake again when the DJ comes in between songs, his accent thick.

The Zuckerberg house turns out to be nothing like what Eduardo was expecting; small and tucked onto the end of a housing development, close enough to the M4 that when Mark throws the car into park and shuts the engine off, Eduardo can still make out the ghostly sounds of traffic. Beyond it is a copse of trees, eerie-looking in the dark, and the house itself is dark-colored, all wood paneling like somebody built it with the vague idea of a cabin in mind. Compared with the neighbors, the lawn is horrifically overgrown.

"What?" goes Mark, seeing the way Eduardo eyeballs the choked-up weeds and the tall grass. What probably just looks unkempt in the daylight looks positively dangerous at night. "It actually helps with keeping up anonymity, if you can believe it. And what's so natural about carefully-manicured lawns, anyway?"

He goes around to the other side of the car, opening the passenger-side door. Alicia-Desarae twitches sleepily when he reaches a hand around her to unbuckle her seatbelt, but doesn't open her eyes. Mark smiles knowingly.

"Come on," he says, coaxing. "I know you're awake. You're just faking sleep so I'll carry you into the house. I'm wise to your tricks, you know."

She remains stubbornly still.

He sighs. "What were you saying earlier about wanting the same treatment as everybody else? You don't see me carrying Eduardo into the house."

"I'd like to see you try," Eduardo scoffs, standing off to the side. Mark's eyes flick to him, resting briefly around the extra weight he's put on in the past twenty years, and so therefore misses it: Alicia-Desarae's mouth twitching involuntarily with a smile. He lifts his eyebrows at Mark, nodding at her.

She knows she's been had, so she stretches her arms up, saying sleepily, "I'm not ten yet, though."

This earns her a snort, and Mark slips his arms under her body as she wraps hers around his neck. He hefts her up with some difficulty -- she is nine years old, after all, and Mark is relatively short. He bumps the car door shut with his hip before Eduardo can get it, and carries her as far as the front step before he sets her down so he can unlock the door. 

Inside, it's dark and quiet. Keying in an alarm code that looks longer than most of Eduardo's college textbooks, Mark bends down as Alicia-Desarae toes out of her shoes, scooping them up and putting them in a cubby full of shoes: men's sandals, worn and peeling along the soles; little girl tennis shoes with velcro straps; animal-print kitten heels that Eduardo imagines must belong to Mrs. Zuckerberg, since he doesn't think they're really Mark's style. He leaves his shoes by the door, not sure if guests get a cubby hole.

"Bed?" Alicia-Desarae asks hopefully.

"Nuh-uh," Mark's voice is stern. "Not until you do your hair."

The prospect of more work made her scrunch up her nose in disgust. "Do I have to?"

"That was the agreement, remember? We let you get relaxer because _you_ said you could do the work to keep it nice."

From the face she makes, Eduardo gets the impression that, like most children, Alicia-Desarae had made the promise of later work without fully contemplating what that work might be, just because she wanted a result _now._ "If you and Mom hadn't given me the _worst hair_ in the _world,_ I wouldn't _need_ relaxer," she grumbles, vehement.

"You caught us," Mark drawls, completely unsympathetic. "We planned it that way. There was a check-list. 'Give daughter hair like a circus freak.'"

They're bickering again, so Eduardo slips around them, hoping to explore before Mark remembers that he'll have to drive him back once his daughter is tucked up in bed. There's a staircase immediately in front of him, leading to what he assumes are the bedrooms, and around it, he catches a glimpse of low night-light on kitchen surfaces, and what looks like a living room. He heads for the latter.

It turns out to both be the living room, and not quite; it's got the worn look of a frequently-used room, one a child is in and out of constantly, but it doesn't have the desktop set-up he'd expect a room that Mark frequents to have. Instead, there's a ring of sofas and armchairs, all facing the long, glass windows that expose the front patio and the lawn, weedy as it is all the way to the tree line. Bookshelves line the walls, and Eduardo drifts over, curious -- he'd have thought if anyone would have migrated to e-readers without fuss, it would be Mark. The shelves are a mix of thin children's books and numerous paperbacks, set at the respective eye-levels of their readers. One of them is pulled out half-way; Eduardo fingers the beaten-up spine, smiling faintly.

_My Mouth is a Volcano._ This had been one of Lydia's favorites when she was little, too; a story about a boy who always said what was on his mind, even when those words were hurtful. He learns that not every thought in his head is so important that it needs to be shared; sometimes, they're so important they need to be kept secret, and it's okay that everyone has secret words rumbling in their tummies, because it's important not to hurt people. A good story, he thinks, for a Zuckerberg.

There's another book sitting on the arm of the armchair by the patio door, some gritty-looking true crime novel he doesn't recognize. A bookmark sticks out of it, a little over half-way through.

Eduardo's parents had taught him two different surefire ways to get the measure of a man. Eduardo's father said you did it by taking stock of how he treated his lessers, which -- while being a darkly ironic thing to say, if you think about how Mr. Saverin treated Eduardo over the years -- didn't help him in this case, because Mark let his employees play Pac-Man in the middle of their work day and his chairman make cracks about how he was training his spawn to replace her, and let his daughter eat sugary snacks after midnight.

Eduardo's mother, on the other hand, said the quickest way to get the measure of a man was to look at what he used to mark his place in book. Everyone looks at their bookmarks; it's the best place to keep the most important reminders.

Sinking down into the armchair, he flips the book open; he catches a couple receipts when they try to flutter out. There's also an appointment card for Alicia Zuckerberg, but the biggest thing of all is a postcard -- the front, he's surprised to see, isn't some pretty landscape but a bold-print saying in some thick stencil font:

_1) wake up  
2) swag  
3) go to sleep  
4) repeat_

Which makes him grin. There's tight, cramped script on the back, postmarked the week before, from a location Eduardo can't quite read. It's signed _Love, Maura._

_That's my mother's --_ he remembers Alicia-Desarae starting to say, and smiles to himself. He's glad he wasn't the only one who didn't immediately catch the subtle pronunciation difference between _Maura_ and _Moira._

Still. There are stranger coincidences in the world than Mark and Eduardo having married women with similar names. 

A scuffle, and Mark appears in the doorway, looking curious. There's a pounding of feet from overhead that suggests Alicia-Desarae didn't get her way for once, and is expressing her displeasure by stomping.

"Is your wife not home?" Eduardo asks, perplexed.

Mark and his wife met in 2005 at the annual Bay Area freeze mob, performed every year, tongue-in-cheek, in the enormous lobby of the Googleplex -- an event that had, ironically, been organized that year for the first time through Facebook. The story, if you believe Wikipedia, is that the two of them posed together by the drinking fountain, Mark bent to drink and her interrupting him, the water streaming past their frozen faces, him looking up and her looking down and their eyes locked for the full ten minutes. Their respective poker faces made them exquisite to behold.

Apparently, another way to get the measure of a man is to stare unblinkingly into his eyes for ten minutes. Who knew.

Her first deployment after that (Iraq, before the wedding, before anybody even really knew that they were dating,) marked a noticeable spike in the intensity Mark felt about his job; a ripple that went through the spiderweb-like business world, tugging even at the far-flung edges out where Eduardo and his kind lived, because now for once, Mark was on the same side of the line as the people he was trying to reach -- he knew how it felt, when sometimes the easiest way to communicate with a loved one stationed overseas was Facebook.

There's a picture, floating out there on the Internet somewhere (and in one of Eduardo's flash drives, in a box he probably needs to pick up from their old house before Moira takes it as permission to throw it away,) because nobody really knew what they had until later, of the day those troops came home; you can just see, in the background behind someone else's cheering, happy face, Mark and Maura wrapped around each other, Maura's face buried in Mark's neck and her fatigue-print cap transfered to his head. 

There's no faking the the kind of raw expressions they wore, and Eduardo couldn't even muster up an echo of bitterness that Mark at least remembered to pick _her_ up from the airport, because it wasn't the same at all.

Her second deployment (South Africa during the 2016 riots, so soon after the birth of her daughter that it had people shifting and muttering about how America treated those that defended them in wartime, asking a soldier to leave her newborn daughter like that,) Mark joined her briefly as a civilian, a mysterious two-month absence that nobody knows much about, in that hand-waving way the military does sometimes. The same taciturn manner of speaking that made Mark a nightmare in the board room earned him tight-lipped friends among the other soldiers. Mark and Maura both came home safe -- Eduardo didn't even know they'd been gone until the news of their return cropped up in the corner of his Google dashboard.

"Who, Maura?" Mark goes, like there's some other wife they could be talking about. And then, "Oh, she actually does work from our private island in the Philippines."

"Really?" Eduardo blinks. He thought Mark had been kidding about that.

"Well," Mark twitches his shoulders, not quite a shrug. "Tahiti, and it's just a beach house, clustered in with a bunch of other over-the-top resort-like places. I don't remember exactly, I've only been a couple times. A whole island might have been nice, but I guess the market isn't as good as it used to be, or something."

Eduardo can't quite tell if Mark is fucking with him or not, so he stays quiet, tucking the true crime novel in between the cushions of the armchair.

It's a good choice, actually, because Mark seems to be debating something with himself, his eyebrows low and pulled together. He shifts his weight, socks scuffing where the tile of the hallway meets the carpet. Eduardo hears a mutter that sounds an awful lot like, _but it's Wardo,_ before Mark comes into the room, folding himself down into the chair directly opposite him, the cluttered length of a coffee table between them.

"She's with her boyfriend," he announces.

Eduardo feels his eyebrows leap spiritedly up his forehead.

"Um," he fumbles, because Mark looks like he's waiting for the inevitable question that will follow, which in turns makes Eduardo want to exceed expectations and _not_ ask the inevitable, but he isn't sure how to avoid it. "Are you guys ... divorcing, then?" he manages finally. The prospect fills him like a cold leaden weight to the stomach; Eduardo and Moira wound up to be nothing but another statistic, but he would have liked it if the fairy tale story of the soldier and her nerd had a happier ending. Considering what Eduardo had sacrificed, it didn't seem like asking much that Mark should get everything he wants.

Mark looks at him for a moment, careful and considering. In the half-light, his eyes look strange, thinned to slits. Even from here, Eduardo knows their color; the grey-blue pallor of them, like fog or mist.

"No," he shrugs, unceremonious. He scratches at his chin through the grey-flecked goatee, and his words come out of him, halting. "He'd been there, even before me. There are always people who linger, you know, people you can't quite bring yourself to forget. Then she met me, and we were --" he trails off, eyes ticking left to right like he's flicking through a mental dictionary for the right word.

"Perfect," Eduardo supplies, because that's what Wikipedia said, what Ashleigh said (disgustedly,) what Dustin said (less disgustedly,) what Moira said (touching the backs of her knuckles to his face, like she was proud of him for noticing.)

"Yes," Mark allows. "I could offer her more, so she married me. It sounds bad, I know," he continues, and Eduardo fingers the trim on the armchair a little guiltily, because he'd been thinking exactly that; something about the flat way Mark said it, like he and Maura had made an Excel spreadsheet listing pros and cons of one husband over another. "But when you get past the other things our marriage is -- love, trust, all the good things -- then it's mutually beneficial, too. People don't waste my time at parties because I'm not single, and she can keep loving Dan without ever worrying that they're going to screw up what they have by getting married."

The name clicks in the back of Eduardo's head, the same way Alicia's had earlier. He knows Dan, he realizes with a startled jolt; he'd been Mark's best man at the wedding, a curly-haired, gap-toothed man who looked so similar to Mark that Eduardo had assumed he was a close cousin or something. He hadn't gone to the wedding (that had been back when you needed several vaccinations to go to Nigeria, and Eduardo hadn't been up to date,) but he listened to Dustin complain about how he'd been relegated to groomsman.

_Probably because Mark didn't want you to deliver the best man speech,_ Eduardo had rationalized for him.

_That's a valid point,_ Dustin allowed. _I know things about Mark that should NEVER see the light of day._

"We tried it, Dan and I," Mark says conversationally, while Eduardo's still turning this information over in his mind, and he chokes on air.

He's not implying what Eduardo thinks he's implying, could he? "You mean, like ..." he starts, and then goes as tongue-tied as a child, unable to wrap his mind around the idea of it.

Mark smiles, reptilian. "Polyamorously? Yes. But," that shrug again. "We like each other well enough, we're friendly, and the sex isn't disappointing --" he rolls his eyes when Eduardo makes an involuntary _too much information!_ noise, like he caught something in the back of his throat. "But if we lived with each other on a permanent basis, we'd kill each other. We're _too_ alike."

"So," Eduardo wets his lips. "You just, trade off, or ... You let her --"

Mark's eyes narrow, sharpening so fast that Eduardo's teeth click shut of their own accord.

"There's no sacrifice about it," he goes fiercely, his nose crinkling up at the thought, disgusted, the way he'd been when Chris first suggested that maybe he was going to have to apologize for FaceMash. "I don't _let_ them get away with anything. They're happy. I love that they're happy --" His forehead relaxes, face smoothing out into an expression Eduardo has only seen a couple times. "My wife is _happy,_ Wardo. Isn't that amazing? Me, Mark Zuckerberg, I am capable of making a woman happy."

Eduardo smiles, his heart stuttering funny inside his chest, like it just tried to grow two sizes at the words.

"Two," he says, and Mark tilts his head. "Two women. Maura and Alicia."

Mark's lips split, peeling back off his teeth, and it's like this whole conversation has taken the years right off of him, because Eduardo sees nothing but Harvard Mark in him right now, his smile the same boyish lilt he got whenever he had an idea so brilliant he couldn't wait to get it out.

"Yes," he goes, a wealth of wonder in his voice. "Our daughter."

The pain of it lances sharp through the sides of Eduardo's ribs, and he ducks his chin down, unable to look at Mark's smile for a beat longer.

There's a long pause, hovering just close enough to uncomfortable to be noticeable, but then Mark pushes himself out of the other chair, saying, "You can stay here. For the night, I mean."

"You don't have to do that," Eduardo replies, kneejerk, even though he'd seen it coming since he got into the car -- Mark never leaves his daughter home alone, she said so herself.

The twitchy shrug is back. "I know," he says, and that's it.

Eduardo smiles, because throughout the years of getting second-hand stories about Mark's success, this is what he missed the most: the simple, easy way Mark can dissect a person and know exactly how to get to them. It's not hard to trust him, he finds. After all, Mark has been the capable, hardworking, edgy CEO for far longer than he was ever that asshole kid with a chip in his shoulder. They've always seen the best in each other, Mark and Eduardo have, completely unable to help it, which is what made it so much more painful when all they could fight about was the worst.

A sudden thud on the stairs announces Alicia-Desarae's return. They listen to her go through the kitchen, searching, before she appears in the doorway, wearing a themed pajama set, her hair tucked up under a clear shower cap that shows the mess of it has been twisted inexpertly into curlers.

Mark crosses the room to her, tilting her head this way and that as he tucks the cap more firmly down over her head, checking the treatment she used. From here, Eduardo sees his fingers come away oily.

He nods, satisfied, and when Alicia-Desarae squirms away, protesting, he squats at her, good-natured.

"Hey, guys!" she goes, and holds up an object it takes Eduardo a moment to recognize as the camera from before, pink and plastic. "Say cheese, okay?"

It's not a real camera, of course, but it doesn't stop the way Eduardo gets out of his seat, going to Mark's side. It's instinctive, the easy way they fit under each other's arms, even after all this time. Mark's fingers clench along the ball of his shoulder, his own shoulder a bony nudge in Eduardo's armpit. They lean into each other, smiling for Mark's daughter.

"Click!" she says happily.

 

**v.**

 

Mark finally puts Alicia-Desarae to bed; it's so late now that even the nighttime insects have stopped making noise.

Tucked up again in the armchair by the patio door, Eduardo watches the mist creep in through the tall grass, silvery and eerie in the light of the setting moon, and listens to the murmuring exchange of voices upstairs, low with the rhythm of routine.

Eventually, Mark comes back downstairs, carrying in his arms a bundled-up combination of pillow and blankets, which he'd plainly taken from a closet somewhere. He drops them onto the arm of the sofa, and then he looks at Eduardo and he asks, like the question has been sitting at the tip of his tongue all night, "How come you never had children?"

Eduardo closes his eyes.

Maybe if they hadn't had the discussion about Maura, who had enough room in her heart to love two men, Eduardo wouldn't have the strength to talk about it, but as is, he turns his head in the dark and answers, "I did."

He catches the motion in his peripheral; the startled jerk of Mark's chin, the questioning blink. All tells he's seen before.

"Well. She wasn't _mine,"_ he corrects himself, because people with fathers like Eduardo's never go on to reproduce if they can help it. There's too much overwhelming terror there, a fear of becoming those fathers and treating their children the same way they had been treated. Not wanting to inflict that on the next generation is too deeply ingrained; the best thing Eduardo can do is to _not_ pass that gene on, the propensity for neglect and violence. "She was Moira's from a previous relationship. Her name was Lydia," the name comes off his tongue, as musical as it was the first time he said it, in his office, watching a bright-eyed toddler bounce on Moira's hip.

And Mark isn't stupid. He crosses the room, and instead of taking the other chair like he had before, he comes right over and folds himself on the ground in front of Eduardo's chair, limbs bending like pipecleaners, and Eduardo takes a moment to be envious -- he can't get himself up and down from a sitting position on the ground without the aid of a prop anymore, it's embarrassing.

Mark's eyes track him, calm and watchful, and the sorrowful twist to his lips is the only indication that he knows how this story is going to end.

"What happened?" he asks anyway.

He's told the story so many times by now that it isn't the words themselves that hurt him. "We were at the supermarket, the three of us -- milk, bread, eggs, that kind of thing -- and we lost track of her. For five minutes --" is as far as he gets, before it slams back into him and his throat closes up.

Never, never, never in his life, not even during that long-ago lawsuit, has Eduardo _ever_ poured over any single length of time as obsessively as he has those five minutes; from Lydia's tiny hand stealing a butterscotch from his pocket as he weighed fruit, to the moment Moira turned her head, wondering, _hey, where did Lydia get to?_ The face of every stranger is entrenched into his mind, every minute detail, from the fruit stacked on the stands, the scuffs the carts had made on the linoleum, the flickering bright lights. For years afterwards, any kind of grocery store at all triggered waves of nauseating sense memory. 

What happened to his daughter? Where did she go?

Those are the questions that haunt him. Every horrible thing that ever happened to him seemed diminished in the face of that.

"Five minutes of inattention was all it took," he says quietly. "They never found her. They still run the Amber Alert sometimes, you know, back home."

The hope, though? 

The hope is the worst part. You never give up on hope, not even when you give up on everything else, not even when the hope hurts nearly as much as her absence.

Mark listens, saying nothing, as Eduardo scratches at a dry patch of skin along his hairline and says, somewhere in the direction of the carpet, "She'd be fifteen now. Fifteen, can you believe it? She'd be in _high school,_ Mark, doing high school things, and she'd be taller and maybe she'd need braces. Or what if she had glasses? Do you think other kids would have made fun of her for having glasses, or would she be that chic girl? These are the kinds of things I wonder every single day," he shrugs. It's not self-pity, really, it's a statement of horrible fact. Moira and Eduardo never had children of their own: each beating second of a new child's life would have been an enemy and a reminder. They each had their own careers, and they were always busy, always going places. It would have been too easy to turn away in a supermarket for another five minutes. 

It was the one thing they agreed on without question -- they were never going to risk it. 

There were other factors in the divorce, of course, but they don't kid themselves. It got too hard, the art of not looking at each other and wondering, _why weren't you watching her?_

They sit there for a long moment, Mark down on the floor and Eduardo sitting in an armchair that smells a little like somebody spilled Glade over it recently. 

They are both absolutely silent.

Finally, Mark straightens up, nodding decisively. He looks up at Eduardo and tells him, "It's not possible to tell the sex of a fetus before it's five months into development," which makes Eduardo blink, trying to follow what that has to do with anything.

And then he catches the set to Mark's jaw and the determined look in his eye and he gets it. This is Mark's idea of an exchange: Eduardo trusted him with a dark secret, so now Mark gives him one in return.

"I'd gone in with Maura for an ultrasound at 21 weeks, and the doctor told us we were having a girl, and I ..." he frowns, then rallies against his instinctive need to bite this down, and continues. "My first feeling was disappointment. I'd kind of wanted a son, like, so far I'd been picturing doing father-son things. I don't know, it was ... it was just a moment, you know, this very brief moment and I knew it was wrong as I was thinking it, but I don't think I'll ever forgive myself for it." He meets Eduardo's eyes again. "Alicia hadn't even been born yet, and I was already disappointed in her."

"But she's amazing," says Eduardo, knowing that the basis for him saying so is weak at best: he's only known her for the length of a fashion show and a car ride, and he's pretty sure half of it was him trying not to see bits of Lydia in her, but it does the trick. Mark's face softens, relaxes into a besotted smile, the same look he'd worn in the CS lab, holding a manilla envelope with Eduardo's money in it and their first intern standing with him. #24 vanishes from Eduardo's bucket list as quietly as if it never was.

"Yeah, she is," Mark goes.

They are quiet some more, but they're smiling now, and it's easier to keep quiet and keep smiling than it is to break this.

Then Eduardo says, very low and very serious, "Mark."

Mark rocks forwards onto his crossed legs, his face turned up to him, inquisitive.

"Mark," Eduardo tells him. "I respect you. You're a good man, but," and his voice drops further, with all the seriousness of _I'm not coming back to 30%, I'm coming back for everything,_ and a wealth more age and power behind it. "If you ever, _ever_ let your daughter out of your sight again, like you did today, I will bash your head into pieces, do you understand?"

Mark looks at him for a beat, and Eduardo can tell that they are both listening now. For once, they are _both_ listening.

"If something ever happened to Alicia because of me," Mark says, very soft. "I'd do it myself."

 

**vi.**

 

When he wakes up, the midmorning sun is coming in through the window, so bright that it highlights the dust motes in the air and falls across the spines of the books on the bookshelves in a way that will turn them pale after long exposure.

He tilts his head up, neck creaking in protest (what you gain in wealth, maturity, and dignity with age, you lose in ability to sleep on sofas like frat boys,) and finds Alicia-Desarae standing over him, her face upside-down and very, very close.

_"Ah!"_ he yelps, recoiling.

There's a cat he's never seen before sitting on the arm of the sofa, its head aligned with the girl's and tilted in the exact same way, peering at him. Its face is a mottled mixture of brown and a lighter toffee color, and its whiskers flare forward when he jolts, disturbed. Alicia-Desarae grins. Her hair, he notices, is tamer-looking today, pulled out of her face with two big pink barrettes, shining in the light. This must be the result of all that fuss earlier.

"He's awake!" she roars, making him cringe at the volume.

"It's bright," he returns croakily. "I thought the sun didn't shine on this side of the world."

"I _know!"_ she goes, voice soaring up in delight. "It's so exciting! If you weren't, like, old, I would take you to the pond with my friends and me, it's really cool."

Eduardo doesn't even want to touch the "old" comment, but he's pretty sure he wouldn't be altogether comfortable around a swampy pond with a bunch of nine-year-old girls, regardless. "My friends and I," he corrects her.

"That's what I said," she returns promptly, and spins on her heel, darting off and leaving Eduardo with the unimpressed-looking cat. It's wearing a collar as bright pink and flashy as everything else Alicia-Desarae owns, and he wonders if that means it's a girl cat or if Mark's daughter just likes dressing it up as a furry extension of herself.

He rolls himself up into a sitting position, picking the crud out of the corner of his eyes and then, not sure what the extent of his welcome is in this household or where he's allowed to poke his head into, he pulls his blanket towards him and starts folding it, for lack of anything else to do.

He can hear Alicia-Desarae, her footsteps pattering around in the kitchen. A toaster coil springs, and her voice yelps, "Mine! Mine, mine, mine."

" _Please,"_ Mark's voice interjects. He sounds frightfully awake, like he hadn't sat cross-legged on the carpet, watching Eduardo migrate from armchair to couch and staying until he fell asleep.

"Mine, please," she echoes obediently. 

Plates clatter. Eduardo smells waffles and syrup.

A moment later, Mark appears in the doorway, yesterday's pants hauled haphazardly over his hips and a clean shirt hanging loose on his bird-like frame; his feet are bare, which makes Eduardo blink a little bit, because it's been a surprisingly long time since he's seen those long bones and crooked toes. The corner of Mark's mouth twitches at the sight of him straightening the folds of the blanket.

"Hey," Eduardo goes by way of greeting, dropping the blanket on top of his pillow. "Thanks for ..." he gestures.

Mark makes an acknowledging noise but says nothing. He stands there, watching, long enough that Eduardo feels his mouth begin to pull up at the corners, amused and a little bit perplexed.

"Are you --" he starts, but Mark seems to make up his mind in that second, because he pushes himself off the doorframe and crosses the room to where Eduardo's sitting. Such is the expression on his face that in his sleepy state, Eduardo doesn't even question it, not even when Mark stops right in front of him, not even when Mark's hand lands on his shoulder, not even when Mark bends at the waist.

And then Mark's mouth is on his and Eduardo doesn't know what to think.

The last time he kissed a boy was when he was fourteen, his freshman year of high school, and admittedly, he didn't know what to do then, either. That ... that had been the 90s, which, okay, sure, it hadn't exactly been the Dark Ages, but the perpetually-awkward sex ed courses didn't cover homosexuality in those days, so Eduardo had been under the assumption that it just wouldn't work; that his lips and Julian's would just slide away from each other like repelling ends of a magnet. After all, it's always men and women you see kissing in movies and stuff, so didn't that mean that men _couldn't_ kiss men, even though they both had lips to kiss with?

Well, obviously he got proven wrong on that count, and he remembered it being incredibly weird and wet, and he'd told Julian afterwards that he wasn't interested, was that okay? (Julian got over it -- he'd always been much more confident than Eduardo and it worked for him.)

After that ... well, he didn't actively avoid _men,_ per se, it was just, whenever he wanted to kiss someone, usually a girl was the first one brave enough to kiss him first, and then there was Moira and Eduardo wouldn't have looked at anyone else even if they landed in front of him naked.

So it doesn't really register at first; Eduardo's preoccupied with the unfamiliar sensation of Mark's goatee scraping against his chin and the pressure of his hand on his shoulder before he even realizes that this is a _kiss,_ Mark is _kissing_ him, lippy but not demanding, not the pecking way of somebody's aunt, but the way you'd kiss on your first turn at spin-the-bottle, when you desperately, desperately want somebody to like you enough to kiss back.

Settling his fingers against Mark's hip, catching a belt loop, Eduardo stretches his neck up, canting into the pressure, and Mark makes a pleased noise. The kiss gets a lot wetter at that point, but that's okay, it's not unpleasant. He's 42, and it thrills through him, as exciting as if it was all completely new.

"What?" Eduardo manages, when it finally breaks. 

It's the most coherent question he can form at the moment.

Mark's hand catches against the side of his face briefly, thumb skimming the line of his jaw, and then he pulls away.

Retreating, he tosses over his shoulder, almost casual, "You're not the only one with a bucket list."

He disappears into the kitchen, where Alicia-Desarae greets him at high volume with her proposal about going to the pond with her friends. Mark asks her if she has everyone's number.

"Oh, _please,"_ she goes, long-suffering, and then, "Breakfast, Eduardo, come on!" as more plates go rattling.

He has a meeting in Dublin later today, and he should probably get them to drive him back to his hotel first and change, so that he doesn't walk in there wearing the same clothes he wore on the plane, complete a dark brown bowler cap with the Irish flag tucked into the brim -- that might not go over well. 

Smiling to himself, his mouth still tingling with the phantom pressure of Mark's, Eduardo pushes himself to his feet and goes to join them.

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
